X.Org News Archives

The 2010 X.Org Developers' Summit in Toulouse has been over for a week, but the disappointing weather in Munich today Oktoberfest finally made it sound more enticing to take care of the remaining XDS 2010 coverage rather than drinking Augustiner in a wet pair of lederhosens. With that said, below are the video recordings of when Keith Packard and Peter Hutterer were talking about the X.Org Server development process changes that have resulted in surprisingly on-time releases.

As a reminder to those interested in participating in our annual Linux Graphics Survey, there's now less than a week before this survey officially is over at month's end. This survey is meant to provides some quantitative data about what the Linux community is most interested in when it comes to graphics driver features and the hardware and drivers currently being most utilized, etc.

A few days back I reported on the first operating system where you may see the Wayland Display Server used rather than an X.Org Server after talking with Kristian Høgsberg while in Toulouse. At the X.Org Developer Summit' he talked to everyone about EGL in Mesa, which also plays an important role with Wayland.

The X.Org Developers' Summit in Toulouse, France just ended and it's time in the morning to head to Oktoberfest to meet with many Phoronix readers at this annual outing. XDS 2010 turned out to be a wonderful event and more organized than some X.Org events in the past. Thanks to the wonderful organization by Matthieu Herrb, the venue itself was nice, the social event last night was terrific, the Internet and power at the event was plenty, etc. Stay tuned for Phoronix notes and some audio/video recordings to be published in the coming days, beyond what has already been reported. At XDS 2010 it was also brought up where to host XDS 2011.

While X Server 1.10 is not being discussed at length until tomorrow (the final day of XDS Toulouse), besides today's notes, Luc Verhaegen who formerly was with Novell working on the RadeonHD driver and has also worked on the open-source VIA Unichrome driver and a few other X related projects, is preparing for another heated battle.

Originally at the X.Org Developers' Summit here in Toulouse this week there was going to be a talk entitled "Kill It With Fire" where Corbin Simpson (mostly known for his work on the ATI R300 Gallium3D driver) was going to be speaking about what drivers or parts of X.Org should be eliminated from the stack. This talk though is no longer occurring, in part as Corbin is no longer in attendance; he washed his US passport in the laundry.

Scheduling issues had plagued X.Org Server development for the past few years: to the point that even delivering a point release had come more than a year late and major X Server releases were never delivered on time. This though has fortunately changed.

Matt Dew, a self-proclaimed "X newbie", just finished talking about his experiences as just entering the world of X.Org development and hopes to contribute to the X.Org world by gathering up and improving X.Org documentation.

For those interested in the X Developers' Summit (XDS) that is taking place next week at a tobacco factory in France, a tentative schedule has now been published by Matthieu Herrb for the 50 or so people that will be participating in the summit.

While there is Oktoberfest in two weeks, in just a week and a half there is the annual X.Org Developers' Summit. This year's summit for these developers is taking place in Toulouse, France. The event was going to be hosted at a conference room at the University of Toulouse, but due to delays in renovating that room, this X.Org summit has been moved to an ex-tobacco factory.

Two years ago we compiled a list of the top contributors to the X Server over the years and that was followed by compiling a similar list of the developers behind Mesa. Tiago Vignatti has now compiled some statistics surrounding the top contributors to X.Org Server 1.9 and related X components just looking at this most recent development cycle. There's also numbers for the input, video, and Mesa components too.

Earlier this month Canonical introduced its own multi-touch framework for Ubuntu that is set to premiere with Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" and it's called UTouch and is joined by their own gesture/touch language. That same day as announcing UTouch for Ubuntu that will support devices like the Apple Magic TrackPad and Dell XT2, Canonical proposed the X.Org Gesture Extension to the X.Org development community. While it's good to see Canonical making more contributions to upstream projects that it depends upon for Ubuntu Linux, the X.Org Gesture Extension is already being re-evaluated and may in fact not be needed.

While X.Org Servger 1.9 was released less than a week ago (heck, it's only been four days since releasing om time), the first interesting patch for X.Org Server 1.10 is already queued up and on the X.Org development mailing list for discussion. This patch, which was written by Tiago Vignatti and Fernando Carrijo, provides the "thread-ification" of the X Server input event generation code. Rather than being bound to the same thread as the X Server, the input event code with this patch is now running in its own thread, but this may only be the start of things to come with finally multi-threading the X.Org Server.

With yesterday's successful release of X.Org Server 1.9 on time by Intel's Keith Packard, most of the developers will now begin working towards X.Org Server 1.10. Like the past few X.Org Server releases, Keith Packard will go on to continue being the release manager for this new series. In the past there's been the input-expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat to handle the stable release management duties for the point releases, but he will not be handling it for the 1.9.x series and it looks like Apple may be taking over.

Keith Packard has announced the official release of X.Org Server 1.9 this evening. Besides this release offering up various bug-fixes and minor improvements, this X Server release is noteworthy as it happens to be the first release in recent times to actually make it out on time. X.Org Server 1.9 hit its original release schedule of being released on the 20th of August.

As many learned today, there's been a rather critical bug living within the Linux kernel for several years (as possibly far back as the original Linux 2.6 kernel release) that was finally fixed and this "high priority" bug is now publicly detailed. This issue (CVE-2010-2240), which allows arbitrary code to be executed as root, is easily exploitable by most current Linux desktops via simply running any compromised GUI application that has access to the running X.Org Server.